SEO for Ecommerce Product Pages: 10 Effective Tips
SEO 7 min read
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These top-to-bottom checklist will help your YouTube videos rank better on the video search. Check ’em out.
A good video marketer knows he or she must utilize eye-catching and relevant video ideas to boost brand awareness among their audience. But here’s the catch: every creator wants to be good; so expect the competition to be tough. The only way you can dominate the YouTube rankings is to use powerful video optimization strategies.
If you’re a stranger to what kind of technique that is, then you need not worry. Because we’re handing you a complete YouTube video optimization checklist to help your well-produced videos rank better.
With our experience and breadth as an SEO company, we’ve come up with this comprehensive video optimization guide for you. Check out all the necessary tips and tools that we covered to ensure that your videos land in the top spots of Youtube’s rankings.
To rank higher in YouTube’s search pages, take a cue from your own video SEO best practices. Google has since indexed YouTube videos in its own search engine results pages, so you have to combine both your SEO and video creation tactics.
These video search engine optimization factors will not only rank your videos but will also boost engagement and conversion rates for your YouTube content.
Setting the metrics that you want to meet is the first step in optimizing YouTube videos, or any optimization efforts for that matter.
Metrics can tell you a lot about the progress of your efforts and direct your strategies. But, on the other hand, these can also confuse you if you don’t know exactly where to look. Especially when there are dozens of metrics you can track on analytics tools.
To avoid this, you’ll have to zero in on the most important metrics. Important in the sense that they are the most relevant to your goals. Below are some specific YouTube SEO metrics that you need to keep a careful eye on:
Knowing these metrics and establishing your targets for them early on is critical in your Youtube video optimization and digital marketing efforts.
Doing so ensures that you not only see the results you want but, more importantly, achieve consistent results.
Not optimizing your video’s file name is one common area that video content creators often neglect to do. That’s why that’s the second thing on your video optimization checklist.
Small of an effort it may be, but it’ll prove helpful in your efforts to rank your videos, as this is still data that search engines can read online. In writing the file name, keep in mind that it should be descriptive of your video’s topic and contain your target keyword.
Let’s say you plan on uploading a tutorial video for writing better headlines, and your main keyword is ‘headline writing’. If that’s the case, you can export your videos with the file name “YouTube video on headline writing.”
Keeping the file names clean – doesn’t contain dashes, periods, or non-alphanumeric characters – also helps crawlers to better understand and index your content.
Just like using an on-page SEO checklist where you optimize the title, video content will also need an optimized title.
In practice, it’s very similar to our previous point on inserting the keyword in the file name. But since this is a feature that is directly seen and observed by viewers, you will need to do more than just seasoning it with high-volume keywords.
Since the aim of your headline is to win a click or a view, you will want to optimize your video title to make it attention-grabbing. Additionally, they should be relevant to both your topic and the search intent of your target audiences.
Fundamentally, an effective headline should meet the following criteria:
It also helps to assess the video titles of competitor content when thinking of one for your own. This practice of comparing will help you identify a message that isn’t conveyed by your competitors, or even a new angle to explore for your content itself.
Take this information and use it to inspire better and unique content. Ultimately, the content that provides new and informative insight is what the search engines will prioritize.
Apart from the title, the description boxes are also great areas to implement optimizations. As a dedicated area for explaining what your video is about, you can use the description box to insert a number of other keywords.
Aim to use this description box to insert keywords that you just can’t squeeze into the title. Not only that, but it’s also a place to put in links to your other content and pages that can’t exist in video format. All-in-all, applying optimizations by adding relevant keywords and links in this area can help your overall content marketing efforts in two key ways:
Let’s make an example of the description box for this video tutorial on how to hot-swap switches on a mechanical keyboard:
In the first orange box, you’ll see that Switch and Click ticked off this item on the video optimization checklist perfectly.
The pre-text describing the link contains relevant keywords to their main topic. Then, the link provided directs to content on their website that provides information on a topic relevant to the audience, which is ‘recommended hot-swappable keyboards’.
Further down in the second orange box, she also features other content from tangential topics on mechanical keyboards. She features a general tool used in the community to to test switches, and a link to one she personally recommends.
For your content, you should aim to provide the same full-bodied and relevant context in the description box. Because above all, the more helpful it is to your audiences, the more YouTube will prioritize your video for ranking.
Video hashtags are, of course, not to be left out. Hashtags help people find videos easily, so make sure that you use relevant and targeted keywords for your video tags.
Where you put your video hashtags is also important. Never put them in your video title, because having them there won’t get them hyperlinked to the corresponding landing pages. It would be much better, in this case, to place them in the description box.
Making use of hashtags helps your content be indexed for the YouTube hashtag landing pages for specific topics. In our example above, inserted hashtags for topics we want to signal relevance to which are of course #digitalmarketing, #socialmediamarketing, #b2bmarketing, and #contentmarketing.
Clicking on each hashtag will lead you to a page where all other videos containing the same hashtags are indexed and featured.
Categories are a feature that provides tremendous benefit for searchers and viewers who have yet to find a reliable source for their content needs.
In your case, as the creator, you’re going to want to vie for that spot as their top-of-mind source, apart from aiming to rank. Making sure that your videos are categorized helps achieve both in this sense.
When uploading content, make sure that you check off the relevant categories for your content. Avoid choosing categories that are unrelated, even if they have a tempting view count and popularity. This just leads to friction for viewers and might garner you negative interactions that will get you ranking down, instead of up.
Thumbnails can help grab your customer’s attention. These thumbnails let them decide whether the video is worth watching or not. Make sure that your customized thumbnail gives an interesting preview of your video.
Let’s take a look at some examples below. Do you find a thumbnail that looks appealing to you? Which one will most likely get you to click? And what are its elements that really compelled you to click?
Your answers to those questions should give you an insight into how to come up with video thumbnails. For this aspect of video optimization, you should consider that carefully, along with best practices for designing visual content.
YouTube is a global platform that allows you to reach audiences from all around the world. That brings to light needs in content that take into consideration the diversity of audiences.
Providing closed captions is a step we made sure to include in the video optimization checklist, not just for the benefit of search engines but ultimately, for the viewers. And it’s to-that-end, plus winning heavy points in ranking is why you should make sure to add closed captions and subtitles.
Taking it plainly as a way to optimize for search engines, closed captions and subtitles uploaded as SRT files are also readable by indexing robots. Much like your description box, you can use this file to provide more context and add relevant keywords you’d like to rank for.
On YouTube or any channel for that matter, it’s natural that you would want to increase engagements for your other content. In video search platforms specifically, this is achieved by adding Cards and End Screens.
Inserting these features into your videos helps to increase awareness and engagements for your other content uploaded on the channel. Insert Cards and End Screens that usher your viewers to videos tackling related topics, or perhaps in-depth explainers on other topics of interest to them.
It’s with this video optimization technique that you can keep your viewers’ eyes glued to your channel. You can see a perfect example of this done in the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon’s channel.
The three floating cards are what you see after a specific video ends are what you call the End Screens. And, as you can see, they link to other videos recently uploaded on the page, or videos that are related to the one you just finished watching.
Looking at this example puts into better perspective not just the use of End Screens, but also the importance of designing creative and engaging Thumbnails for your videos.
So make it a good and consistent practice to think about how you package your videos from start to finish.
Video optimization tools are necessary for your top-to-bottom efforts to rank your content. As we like to say; great content is optimized as early as ideation and planning. And if you’re lacking the tools to get things done, then here are a few of our recomended video optimization tools you can start with.
Photo courtesy of Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
And finally, we’d like to leave you with some best practices to take note of when conducting your video optimizations. Though video optimization strategies will vary from creator to creator, best practices are the usual common denominators you can apply for some quick wins on the platform. Heed and apply them as you see fit for your strategies:
Before we let you go and set out to apply this checklist in your video optimizations, make sure to keep these key takeaways at the top of your mind:
Video optimizations should never be done haphazardly; but with its extensiveness, along with the care and attention, it requires there’s a lot of room for error. This checklist helps lessen those errors as much as possible.
But if you find yourself still skipping over a few steps unintentionally, then maybe that’s the time you can have a chat with us. Share your deepest pains in video optimization and let us help you figure it out by messaging us over on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn accounts.
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